Pope Leo and the Illiteracy of Modern Movies

Pope Leo recently gave a talk to people in the filmmaking industry about the importance of their art. The talk received rapturous reviews, with several critics elevating the pope’s words.

There is an irony here. Pope Leo’s words revealed what’s wrong with modern movies. They are no longer literate. Film is, of course, a visual medium, but the best movies, the ones that stay with us, have always been the ones that are well-written. As literacy declines, so do our films.

Hollywood’s current problems of being artistically incapable of moving beyond superhero reruns or wokeness are the not-so-subtle targets of the pope’s intelligent and poetic words. Read the first three paragraphs of the pope’s talk and imagine a great actor, say Jimmy Stewart or Meryl Streep, delivering them.

Although cinema is now over a century old, it is still a young, dreamlike and somewhat restless art form. It will soon celebrate its 130^th anniversary, counting from the first public screening by the Lumiere brothers in Paris on 28 December 1895. From the outset, cinema was as a play of light and shadow, designed to amuse and impress. However, these visual effects soon succeeded in conveying much deeper realities, eventually becoming an expression of the desire to contemplate and understand life, to recount its greatness and fragility and to portray the longing for infinity...